The story of how Walt Disney coaxed P.L. Travers, the creator of "Mary Poppins" and a soul as tough as old boots, into letting him turn her flying nanny into the star of a Disney movie featuring cheery songs by the Sherman Brothers and starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, is now being told all over the world in the new film "Saving Mr. Banks." Actually, there's a lesser-known story, perhaps more interesting, about what happened when British theatrical producer Cameron Mackintosh went to see Travers in London many years after the meeting depicted in the film.

This was another courtship, but one that took place in England some 30 years after the 1964 Disney movie and not so long before Travers' death. By this point, the Australian-born author had had years to reflect on the compromises she made and the fame and money the "Mary Poppins" film had brought. And the result of the Mackintosh meeting was a hit stage musical, a show that reflected a fundamental shift in the moral lessons we seek from our mainstream family entertainment at the movies, on television or at the theater, especially at Christmastime.

"Saving Mr. Banks," which tells the back story of Disney's attempts to wrestle the rights for "Mary Poppins" from the fearful Travers, casts Disney as a paternalistic blend of shrewd businessman and benign, faux-Freudian shrink. As played by Tom Hanks, the Walt Disney of the screenplay by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith encourages Travers, who still is wracked with submerged pain over the long-ago death of her father, to entrust him with her beloved flying creation, an outgrowth of her own subconscious and her hapless childhood attempts to save her beloved alcoholic father from himself.

Let your "Mary Poppins" go, Hanks' Disney says to Travers (played by Emma Thompson) — and, by extension, the movie says to the viewer, you let go of your own pain. To share is to assuage. To animate is to ennoble. Better to go to Disneyland than wallow in your baggage from back when you were a fearful, unhappy kid.

The veracity of the movie's telling of this back story certainly is open to question, especially in its depiction of the Disney-Travers relationship. Its tone is notably different from the 2005 New Yorker article by Caitlin Flanagan, which began with Travers weeping at the premiere of "Poppins" at what had been done to her book. But one could hardly fault Disney, under an obligation both to the value of its own brand and the need to put out a commercially viable movie, for indulging in a little revisionist history with an upbeat spin. The truth was always complicated. In fact, Travers went to see "Mary Poppins" plenty of times after that premiere, so maybe there is some truth to the screenplay. The only person who could verify that died in 1996.

The stage version of "Mary Poppins" actually was a co-production between Disney and Mackintosh, the ever-shrewd latter being fully aware that the Sherman Brothers songs from the movie had by then become a constituent part of what the general public understood to be the text of "Mary Poppins." No one would want to see a show that lacked "Feed the Birds" or "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious." Nonetheless, as Mackintosh discussed at some length in a 2009 interview with this newspaper, Travers wanted the stage musical to be based on her books, not the movie, and she wanted the show to have the kind of dark, truthful tone that you see her fighting for in "Saving Mr. Banks" (for the most part, she lost that fight in Hollywood). She signed on the dotted line with the Disney-Mackintosh partnership in 1995, just a matter of months before her death.

Even though it was a hybrid of the movie and the original books and thus inherently a compromise, the stage musical version of "Mary Poppins," which bowed in London in 2004, actually came a good deal closer to the avuncular Travers style. There were no dancing penguins, Mary Poppins was notably frostier, and a "Jolly Holiday" with her was not quite so chirpy. By the time that same show moved to Broadway, the tone actually shifted a little more back toward the Disneyfication you can see explored in "Saving Mr. Banks," but, nonetheless, there remained in that musical a notably intense adherence to what Travers clearly had wanted from Disney himself but did not actually get. Which had never not stopped her, of course, from cashing all those checks.

That's show business, you might be thinking. And you'd be right. And it's true that the passage of time, and the post-1970s rediscovery of the marketability of dark hues in children's literature, also had an impact. But here is what Mackintosh and Thomas Schumacher, who by the 1990s was running the theatrical side of Disney, managed to do differently. They realized that Travers' desire to save Mr. Banks (in other words, as the movie explores, her wish to expunge her own guilt at not being able to help her loving father) actually could translate into a lesson with broader appeal. Disney saw it as a key to winning over an individual and getting a movie made that he really wanted to make: his heirs saw broader possibilities.

In "Saving Mr. Banks" you can see Disney play the card of the armchair analyst, coaxing trust from the psychologically wounded Travers by surrounding her with benevolence at every turn, represented in the movie by a large, stuffed Mickey Mouse, who eventually escorts Travers into the premiere, her capitulation complete. But in Julian Fellowes' book for the live musical version of "Mary Poppins" (Fellowes would go on to create "Downton Abbey"), the character of Mr. Banks, which Travers had based on her own father, was not so much a personal manifestation as a symbol of what almost all parents these days secretly fear: that they have too little time to spend with their kids, and thus are ruining them for life.

So Fellowes messed with Travers' moralistic creative universe yet again: He made "Poppins" not an imaginative outgrowth of the dark memories of a unhappy woman, nor an uber-nanny with the crisply comforting efficiency of Julie Andrews, but a nanny whose entire raison d'etre was to tell parents that they did not need nannies at all. Not if they worked a bit less. Not if they focused on what mattered. Not if they got with the program. Not if they were any good.

That lesson — to which we all subscribe, even as we usually fail to live up to its strictures — helped the stage version of "Mary Poppins" pack 'em in — in London, Australia, on Broadway — for years. Especially at Christmas, when we foreground time with the family and even the most hapless workaholic might put down the tablet to unwrap a parcel.

Fellowes' darker "Mary Poppins" had quite a different moral core from "A Christmas Carol," which tells us to give more of our stuff to the poor, or "It's a Wonderful Life," which tells us to act as moral beacons in our community and be happy doing so, but it's a far more modern idea.

For the affluent classes, it's much easier now to create a foundation than regularly find the time to fly a kite with junior. We all know this (heck, the movie "Elf" also knew it, and ran with the same seasonal theme), and we all fear it, just as Travers feared her own dreams.

Would she have been more pleased with what happened in London in 2004 and beyond, as compared with Los Angeles in 1964? Impossible to say, as Travers took her real feelings about "Mary Poppins" — among the most complex (and, thanks to Disney, lucrative) of children's heroines — to her grave.